For though, seduced and led astray,
Thoust travell’d far and wander’d long,
Thy God hath seen thee all the way,
And all the turns that led thee wrong
The Hall of Justice.
After the space of about three-quarters of an hour, which the uncertainty
and danger of their situation made seem almost thrice as long, the voice
of young Hazlewood was heard without. ‘Here I am,’ he cried, ‘with a
sufficient party.’
‘Come in then,’ answered Bertram, not a little pleased to find his guard
relieved. Hazlewood then entered, followed by two or three countrymen,
one of whom acted as a peace-officer. They lifted Hatteraick up and
carried him in their arms as far as the entrance of the vault was high
enough to permit them; then laid him on his back and dragged him along as
well as they could, for no persuasion would induce him to assist the
transportation by any exertion of his own. He lay as silent and inactive
in their hands as a dead corpse, incapable of opposing, but in no way
aiding, their operations. When he was dragged into daylight and placed
erect upon his feet among three or four assistants who had remained
without the cave, he seemed stupefied and dazzled by the sudden change
from the darkness of his cavern. While others were superintending the
removal of Meg Merrilies, those who remained with Hatteraick attempted to
make him sit down upon a fragment of rock which lay close upon the
high-water mark. A strong shuddering convulsed his iron frame for an
instant as he resisted their purpose. ‘Not there! Hagel! you would not
make me sit THERE?’
These were the only words he spoke; but their import, and the deep tone
of horror in which they were uttered, served to show what was passing in
his mind.
When Meg Merrilies had also been removed from the cavern, with all the
care for her safety that circumstances admitted, they consulted where she
should be carried. Hazlewood had sent for a surgeon, and proposed that
she should be lifted in the meantime to the nearest cottage. But the
patient exclaimed with great earnestness, ‘Na, na, na! to the Kaim o’
Derncleugh--the Kaim o’ Derncleugh; the spirit will not free itself o’
the flesh but there.’
‘You must indulge her, I believe,’ said Bertram; ‘her troubled
imagination will otherwise aggravate the fever of the wound.’
They bore her accordingly to the vault. On the way her mind seemed to run
more upon the scene which had just passed than on her own approaching
death. ‘There were three of them set upon him: I brought the twasome, but
wha was the third? It would be HIMSELL, returned to work his ain
vengeance!’
It was evident that the unexpected appearance of Hazlewood, whose person
the outrage of Hatteraick left her no time to recognise, had produced a
strong effect on her imagination. She often recurred to it. Hazlewood
accounted for his unexpected arrival to Bertram by saying that he had
kept them in view for some time by the direction of Mannering; that,
observing them disappear into the cave, he had crept after them, meaning
to announce himself and his errand, when his hand in the darkness
encountering the leg of Dinmont had nearly produced a catastrophe, which,
indeed, nothing but the presence of mind and fortitude of the bold yeoman
could have averted.
When the gipsy arrived at the hut she produced the key; and when they
entered, and were about to deposit her upon the bed, she said, in an
anxious tone, ‘Na, na! not that way--the feet to the east’; and appeared
gratified when they reversed her posture accordingly, and placed her in
that appropriate to a dead body.
‘Is there no clergyman near,’ said Bertram, ‘to assist this unhappy
woman’s devotions?’
A gentleman, the minister of the parish, who had been Charles Hazlewood’s
tutor, had, with many others, caught the alarm that the murderer of
Kennedy was taken on the spot where the deed had been done so many years
before, and that a woman was mortally wounded. From curiosity, or rather
from the feeling that his duty called him to scenes of distress, this
gentleman had come to the Kaim of Derncleugh, and now presented himself.
The surgeon arrived at the same time, and was about to probe the wound;
but Meg resisted the assistance of either. ‘It’s no what man can do that
will heal my body or save my spirit. Let me speak what I have to say, and
then ye may work your will; I’se be nae hindrance. But where’s Henry
Bertram?’ The assistants, to whom this name had been long a stranger,
gazed upon each other. ‘Yes!’ she said, in a stronger and harsher tone,
‘I said HENRY BERTRAM OF ELLANGOWAN. Stand from the light and let me see
him.’
All eyes were turned towards Bertram, who approached the wretched couch.
The wounded woman took hold of his hand. ‘Look at him,’ she said, ‘all
that ever saw his father or his grandfather, and bear witness if he is
not their living image?’ A murmur went through the crowd; the resemblance
was too striking to be denied. ‘And now hear me; and let that man,’
pointing to Hatteraick, who was seated with his keepers on a sea-chest at
some distance--‘let him deny what I say if he can. That is Henry Bertram,
son to Godfrey Bertram, umquhile of Ellangowan; that young man is the
very lad-bairn that Dirk Hatteraick carried off from Warroch wood the day
that he murdered the gauger. I was there like a wandering spirit, for I
longed to see that wood or we left the country. I saved the bairn’s life,
and sair, sair I prigged and prayed they would leave him wi’ me. But they
bore him away, and he’s been lang ower the sea, and now he’s come for his
ain, and what should withstand him? I swore to keep the secret till he
was ane-an’-twenty; I kenn’d he behoved to dree his weird till that day
cam. I keepit that oath which I took to them; but I made another vow to
mysell, that if I lived to see the day of his return I would set him in
his father’s seat, if every step was on a dead man. I have keepit that
oath too. I will be ae step mysell, he (pointing to Hatteraick) will soon
be another, and there will be ane mair yet.’
The clergyman, now interposing, remarked it was a pity this deposition
was not regularly taken and written down, and the surgeon urged the
necessity of examining the wound, previously to exhausting her by
questions. When she saw them removing Hatteraick, in order to clear the
room and leave the surgeon to his operations, she called out aloud,
raising herself at the same time upon the couch, ‘Dirk Hatteraick, you
and I will never meet again until we are before the judgment-seat; will
ye own to what I have said, or will you dare deny it?’ He turned his
hardened brow upon her, with a look of dumb and inflexible defiance.
‘Dirk Hatteraick, dare ye deny, with my blood upon your hands, one word
of what my dying breath is uttering?’ He looked at her with the same
expression of hardihood and dogged stubbornness, and moved his lips, but
uttered no sound. ‘Then fareweel!’ she said, ‘and God forgive you! your
hand has sealed my evidence. When I was in life I was the mad randy
gipsy, that had been scourged and banished and branded; that had begged
from door to door, and been hounded like a stray tyke from parish to
parish; wha would hae minded HER tale? But now I am a dying woman, and my
words will not fall to the ground, any more than the earth will cover my
blood!’
She here paused, and all left the hut except the surgeon and two or three
women. After a very short examination he shook his head and resigned his
post by the dying woman’s side to the clergyman.
A chaise returning empty to Kippletringan had been stopped on the
highroad by a constable, who foresaw it would be necessary to convey
Hatteraick to jail. The driver, understanding what was going on at
Derncleugh, left his horses to the care of a blackguard boy, confiding,
it is to be supposed, rather in the years and discretion of the cattle
than in those of their keeper, and set off full speed to see, as he
expressed himself, ‘whaten a sort o’ fun was gaun on.’ He arrived just as
the group of tenants and peasants, whose numbers increased every moment,
satiated with gazing upon the rugged features of Hatteraick, had turned
their attention towards Bertram. Almost all of them, especially the aged
men who had seen Ellangowan in his better days, felt and acknowledged the
justice of Meg Merrilies’s appeal. But the Scotch are a cautious people:
they remembered there was another in possession of the estate, and they
as yet only expressed their feelings in low whispers to each other. Our
friend Jock Jabos, the postilion, forced his way into the middle of the
circle; but no sooner cast his eyes upon Bertram than he started back in
amazement, with a solemn exclamation, ‘As sure as there’s breath in man,
it’s auld Ellangowan arisen from the dead!’
This public declaration of an unprejudiced witness was just the spark
wanted to give fire to the popular feeling, which burst forth in three
distinct shouts: ‘Bertram for ever!’ ‘Long life to the heir of
Ellangowan!’ ‘God send him his ain, and to live among us as his forebears
did of yore!’
‘I hae been seventy years on the land,’ said one person.
‘I and mine hae been seventy and seventy to that,’ said another; ‘I have
a right to ken the glance of a Bertram.’
‘I and mine hae been three hundred years here,’ said another old man,
‘and I sail sell my last cow, but I’ll see the young Laird placed in his
right.’
The women, ever delighted with the marvellous, and not less so when a
handsome young man is the subject of the tale, added their shrill
acclamations to the general all-hail. ‘Blessings on him; he’s the very
picture o’ his father! The Bertrams were aye the wale o’ the country
side!’
‘Eh! that his puir mother, that died in grief and in doubt about him, had
but lived to see this day!’ exclaimed some female voices.
‘But we’ll help him to his ain, kimmers,’ cried others; ‘and before
Glossin sail keep the Place of Ellangowan we’ll howk him out o’t wi’ our
nails!’
Others crowded around Dinmont, who was nothing both to tell what he knew
of his friend, and to boast the honour which he had in contributing to
the discovery. As he was known to several of the principal farmers
present, his testimony afforded an additional motive to the general
enthusiasm. In short, it was one of those moments of intense feeling when
the frost of the Scottish people melts like a snow-wreath, and the
dissolving torrent carries dam and dyke before it.
The sudden shouts interrupted the devotions of the clergyman; and Meg,
who was in one of those dozing fits of stupefaction that precede the
close of existence, suddenly started--‘Dinna ye hear? dinna ye hear? He’s
owned! he’s owned! I lived but for this. I am a sinfu’ woman; but if my
curse brought it down, my blessing has taen it off! And now I wad hae
liked to hae said mair. But it canna be. Stay’--she continued, stretching
her head towards the gleam of light that shot through the narrow slit
which served for a window--‘is he not there? Stand out o’ the light, and
let me look upon him ance mair. But the darkness is in my ain een,’ she
said, sinking back, after an earnest gaze upon vacuity; ‘it’s a’ ended
now,
Pass breath,
Come death!’
And, sinking back upon her couch of straw, she expired without a groan.
The clergyman and the surgeon carefully noted down all that she had said,
now deeply regretting they had not examined her more minutely, but both
remaining morally convinced of the truth of her disclosure.
Hazlewood was the first to compliment Bertram upon the near prospect of
his being restored to his name and rank in society. The people around,
who now learned from Jabos that Bertram was the person who had wounded
him, were struck with his generosity, and added his name to Bertram’s in
their exulting acclamations.
Some, however, demanded of the postilion how he had not recognised
Bertram when he saw him some time before at Kippletringan. To which he
gave the very natural answer--‘Hout, what was I thinking about Ellangowan
then? It was the cry that was rising e’en now that the young Laird was
found, that put me on finding out the likeness. There was nae missing it
ance ane was set to look for’t.’
The obduracy of Hatteraick during the latter part of this scene was in
some slight degree shaken. He was observed to twinkle with his eyelids;
to attempt to raise his bound hands for the purpose of pulling his hat
over his brow; to look angrily and impatiently to the road, as if anxious
for the vehicle which was to remove him from the spot. At length Mr.
Hazlewood, apprehensive that the popular ferment might take a direction
towards the prisoner, directed he should be taken to the post-chaise, and
so removed to the town of Kippletringan, to be at Mr. Mac-Morlan’s
disposal; at the same time he sent an express to warn that gentleman of
what had happened. ‘And now,’ he said to Bertram, ‘I should be happy if
you would accompany me to Hazlewood House; but as that might not be so
agreeable just now as I trust it will be in a day or two, you must allow
me to return with you to Woodbourne. But you are on foot.’--‘O, if the
young Laird would take my horse!’--‘Or mine’--‘Or mine,’ said
half-a-dozen voices.--‘Or mine; he can trot ten mile an hour without whip
or spur, and he’s the young Laird’s frae this moment, if he likes to take
him for a herezeld, [Footnote: See Note 8.] as they ca’d it lang syne.’
Bertram readily accepted the horse as a loan, and poured forth his thanks
to the assembled crowd for their good wishes, which they repaid with
shouts and vows of attachment.
While the happy owner was directing one lad to ‘gae doun for the new
saddle’; another,’ just to rin the beast ower wi’ a dry wisp o’ strae’; a
third, ‘to hie doun and borrow Dan Dunkieson’s plated stirrups,’ and
expressing his regret ‘that there was nae time to gie the nag a feed,
that the young Laird might ken his mettle,’ Bertram, taking the clergyman
by the arm, walked into the vault and shut the door immediately after
them. He gazed in silence for some minutes upon the body of Meg
Merrilies, as it lay before him, with the features sharpened by death,
yet still retaining the stern and energetic character which had
maintained in life her superiority as the wild chieftainess of the
lawless people amongst whom she was born. The young soldier dried the
tears which involuntarily rose on viewing this wreck of one who might be
said to have died a victim to her fidelity to his person and family. He
then took the clergyman’s hand and asked solemnly if she appeared able to
give that attention to his devotions which befitted a departing person.
‘My dear sir,’ said the good minister, ‘I trust this poor woman had
remaining sense to feel and join in the import of my prayers. But let us
humbly hope we are judged of by our opportunities of religious and moral
instruction. In some degree she might be considered as an uninstructed
heathen, even in the bosom of a Christian country; and let us remember
that the errors and vices of an ignorant life were balanced by instances
of disinterested attachment, amounting almost to heroism. To HIM who can
alone weigh our crimes and errors against our efforts towards virtue we
consign her with awe, but not without hope.’
‘May I request,’ said Bertram, ‘that you will see every decent solemnity
attended to in behalf of this poor woman? I have some property belonging
to her in my hands; at all events I will be answerable for the expense.
You will hear of me at Woodbourne.’
Dinmont, who had been furnished with a horse by one of his acquaintance,
now loudly called out that all was ready for their return; and Bertram
and Hazlewood, after a strict exhortation to the crowd, which was now
increased to several hundreds, to preserve good order in their rejoicing,
as the least ungoverned zeal might be turned to the disadvantage of the
young Laird, as they termed him, took their leave amid the shouts of the
multitude.
As they rode past the ruined cottages at Derncleugh, Dinmont said, ‘I’m
sure when ye come to your ain, Captain, ye’ll no forget to bigg a bit
cot-house there? Deil be in me but I wad do’t mysell, an it werena in
better hands. I wadna like to live in’t, though, after what she said. Od,
I wad put in auld Elspeth, the bedral’s widow; the like o’ them’s used
wi’ graves and ghaists and thae things.’
A short but brisk ride brought them to Woodbourne. The news of their
exploit had already flown far and wide, and the whole inhabitants of the
vicinity met them on the lawn with shouts of congratulation. ‘That you
have seen me alive,’ said Bertram to Lucy, who first ran up to him,
though Julia’s eyes even anticipated hers, ‘you must thank these kind
friends.’
With a blush expressing at once pleasure, gratitude, and bashfulness,
Lucy curtsied to Hazlewood, but to Dinmont she frankly extended her hand.
The honest farmer, in the extravagance of his joy, carried his freedom
farther than the hint warranted, for he imprinted his thanks on the
lady’s lips, and was instantly shocked at the rudeness of his own
conduct. ‘Lord sake, madam, I ask your pardon,’ he said. ‘I forgot but ye
had been a bairn o’my ain; the Captain’s sae namely, he gars ane forget
himsell.’
Old Pleydell now advanced. ‘Nay, if fees like these are going,’ he said--
‘Stop, stop, Mr. Pleydell,’ said Julia, ‘you had your fees beforehand;
remember last night.’
‘Why, I do confess a retainer,’ said the Barrister; ‘but if I don’t
deserve double fees from both Miss Bertram and you when I conclude my
examination of Dirk Hatteraick to-morrow--Gad, I will so supple him! You
shall see, Colonel; and you, my saucy misses, though you may not see,
shall hear.’
‘Ay, that’s if we choose to listen, Counsellor,’ replied Julia.
‘And you think,’ said Pleydell, ‘it’s two to one you won’t choose that?
But you have curiosity that teaches you the use of your ears now and
then.’
‘I declare, Counsellor,’ answered the lively damsel, ‘that such saucy
bachelors as you would teach us the use of our fingers now and then.’
‘Reserve them for the harpsichord, my love,’ said the Counsellor. ‘Better
for all parties.’
While this idle chat ran on, Colonel Mannering introduced to Bertram a
plain good-looking man, in a grey coat and waistcoat, buckskin breeches,
and boots. ‘This, my dear sir, is Mr. Mac-Morlan.’
‘To whom,’ said Bertram, embracing him cordially, ‘my sister was indebted
for a home, when deserted by all her natural friends and relations.’
The Dominie then pressed forward, grinned, chuckled, made a diabolical
sound in attempting to whistle, and finally, unable to stifle his
emotions, ran away to empty the feelings of his heart at his eyes.
We shall not attempt to describe the expansion of heart and glee of this
happy evening.